So the question remains, how to deal with a Multibit Classic wallet file in case one does not have the .key files.
I.e. how to decrypt the information in the wallet file
(That is my case.)
It works on multibit.wallet files and dumps out the public/private keypairs... should work on both password protected and non-password protected wallets.
Turns out, I was decrypting them correctly the whole time... I just couldn't get the addresses to match because the python functions I was using to generate addresses was generating the "uncompressed" addresses/keys... whereas MultiBit is using compressed keys... pretty obvious really